Florida is bracing for another major hurricane to strike this week—less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Sunshine State, causing massive devastation that authorities are still trying to clean up.
Tropical Storm Milton was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane on Sunday, but forecasters are warning it could still grow in power before it reaches Florida’s west coast on Wednesday.
Milton is aiming directly for the Tampa Bay area—one of the state’s largest metro areas and home to more than 3 million people.
The Tampa Bay area has seen its fair share of hurricanes, but the storms typically do not strike the region directly from the west from the Gulf of Mexico, instead traveling north along the coast, as seen in the paths of Hurricane Ian in 2022.
AccuWeather’s cheif meteorologist Jonathan Porter called Milton’s trajectory “unusual and extremely concerning.”
Local station WKBN identified four storms that traveled in this direction on record—three of which struck Tampa Bay in the 19th century.
The National Hurricane Center addressed the storm on Sunday, writing that there was an “increasing risk of life threatening storm surge and damaging winds” on Florida’s west coast beginning late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. Forecasters have not determined exactly how powerful Milton will be when it hits Florida, but are warning residents to expect it to strengthen to a “major hurricane.”
Authorities in Florida are now scrambling to prepare for the worst after just getting hit by Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, on Sept. 26.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded the emergency declaration on Sunday, putting 51 of Florida’s 67 counties under a state of emergency—including the cities of Tampa, Miami, and Orlando. In an address to Floridians on Sunday, DeSantis said that over 800 National Guardsmen were already deployed, with another 4,000 deploying in the next few days. He added that the region would be the site of a “24/7” operation to remove debris still left over from Helene and prep for Milton’s arrival.
“You have a storm, then have one less than two weeks later—two majors back to back—that is not something that is easy,” DeSantis said. “We have to do it round the clock, until it is no longer safe to do it.”
At the moment, forecasters are predicting Milton will likely avoid some of the states hit the hardest by flooding and destruction from Helene—including most of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida’s Big Bend region, a more rural part of the Panhandle directly south of the state capital in Tallahassee.
The last time a major storm approached Tampa from the Gulf of Mexico was Tropical Storm Henri in 2003 (a storm unrelated to Hurricane Henri in 2021, which struck Bermuda and the northeast). That storm weakened to a tropical depression before making landfall, according to NOAA.
School cancellations and evacuations have already begun in some parts of the region. Pasco County, directly north of Tampa, began issuing mandatory evacuation on Sunday night already, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
